About

Weightless Books is an independent ebooksite devoted to DRM-free ebooks of all sorts.

We are excited by ereaders which allow the printed pages which we publishers spend so long making pretty, clear, and readable, to be read onscreen—one reason why whenever possible we will always sell pdfs. (PDFS were our biggest seller at first, but epubs have since overtaken them). As time goes by more titles will be available in the two dominant formats, epub and mobi, although some design- or art-heavy publishers prefer to release their ebooks only in hi- and lo-res pdfs.

Weightless Books are waitless—when you order you are immediately taken to a page where you can download your book. You will also be emailed an url from which to download your book. Register, and all your books are available at any time in your Library. You can get your ebooks sent directly to your ereader.

We sell DRM-free ebooks because we believe those who buy ebooks should be able to move them around between their devices at will.

What we want is to make Weightless the first site to go to for interesting ebooks from independent publishers.

Please be kind to these independent publishers and don’t pirate these titles. Thank you!

Weightless Books opened (a soft opening) for business in March 2010 and has been growing organically ever since. Please excuse any mess and we apologize ahead of time for any mistakes we make as we learn. Reader feedback is always appreciated.

At first this site was quite small and as time has gone by, it has gained, if not weight, then heft! Look around, see if we’ve got something you like. Either way, come back in a bit as we’ll always be adding more titles.

Gavin J. Grant is a firm believer in the do-it-yourself. He started a zine, Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, in 1996, cofounded Small Beer Press, an independent publishing house with his wife, Kelly Link, in 2000, and in 2010 launched WeightlessBooks.com, an ebooksite for independent presses. He has been published in the Los Angeles Times, Christian Science Monitor, Bookslut, Xerography Debt, Scifiction, The Journal of Pulse Pounding Narratives, and Strange Horizons. He co-edited The Best of LCRW (Del Rey), Steampunk! An Anthology of Fantastically Rich and Strange Stories, and for five years co-edited the fantasy half of The Year’s Best Fantasy & Horror (St. Martin’s Press). He lives with his wife and daughter in Massachusetts. More: Flickr, Twitter.

Michael J. DeLuca‘s short fiction has appeared, among other places, in Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Interfictions, Apex Magazine, Clockwork Phoenix, Abyss & Apex and Onirismes. He attended the Odyssey Writing Workshop in 2005, has volunteered at Small Beer Press for longer than he cares to admit, and is a member of The Homeless Moon writers’ cabal. He lives in Michigan, brews beer, bakes bread, hugs trees, and builds websites.Read his blog at michaeljdeluca.com.

Gavin talks about Weightless soon after launch at Readercon in Boston in 2010:

Hi
We’re a small public library in Vermont. We just got our first e-reader to circulate among our patrons. We’re not planning to buy ANY copyrighted content because we understand the license will not transfer between users and so we’d be in violation of our agreement to circulate the e-reader with any purchased digital content on it. HOWEVER: has Small Beer Press decided to let libraries circulate the digital content they buy to their library patrons, perhaps? That would be SO AWESOME. Might even merit a press release and get the whole collaborative effort some good press? Please let me know: we’d love to surprise a patron who loves her with a collection of Kelly Link short stories available for her to borrow on our e-reader. thanks. Cutler Memorial Library in Plainfield, Vermont. (Loona Brogan, director)

Dear Loona, thanks for reaching out! I have a couple of answers here. Small Beer Press (Kelly Link and I) love libraries (is that too obvious to say? Maybe not. We love them. So does our kid. We want them to be around forever!). Some of our books are available under the Creative Commons (Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0) license.

But all of our books are available here. We know some libraries buy our ebooks for electronic readers here. I am still undecided on how this works as when libraries buy our paper books, they occasionally replace them with new copies. Libraries aren’t going to do that with ebooks. So should we add DRM and make them only work 26 times? Or a yearly license? If many libraries switch to ebooks, we could be in trouble. For the moment I’m happy for libraries to buy our ebooks for use. In 2 years? Who knows!

I know I’m replying to a 2 year old thread, but I’m curious about what you ended up doing.

On the one hand, I want publishers to make money so they can continue to support authors having a day job as authors. On the other hand, libraries are one of the first places that local funding is cut. If they, thanks to ebooks, only have to buy books once now, it means they can support more authors and have more books for patrons to read.

At the same time, as Spotify and Netflix de-emphasize the idea of owning things – what if people only check out books from the library and stop buying books? Should libraries have stupid arbitrary rules that limit how many copies can be out when digital allows everyone to read the same book at once? What if it’s the only way for books to survive?

It’s complicated. But no matter what licensing model you (and others) choose, I’m always happy when there are DRM free options because it allows me not to be tied to a particular device or ecosystem. And it allows me to do what I could do with physical books – like loan it to my wife/kids/siblings.